Until the things that interest you really become yours, says Brown CS alum Edwina Rissland, you’re not very deep into them. Over an eclectic career spanning more than five decades, she’s dug well below the surface as a computer scientist, mathematician, legal scholar, musician, artist, photographer, and teacher. A true student of the world, her boundless love of learning has allowed her to master and connect fields often considered distinct or even unrelated.
Last year, Brown CS alum Ed Lazowska received a surprise for his birthday: a fund supporting multiple endowed professorships, named in his honor, to commemorate his extensive contributions as a professor of computer science at the University of Washington. Launched by friends at Microsoft and Google and supported by more than 100 others, the professorship fund is a testament to Ed’s long-standing work in promoting computer science research and education over his long career.
Last summer, I interned at Brown University’s Data Science Initiative (DSI) with Professor Ritambhara Singh. The work I was doing, in computational genetics, was fascinating. And the office space was modern and light-filled. But most importantly, the lab was filled with welcoming grad students and amazing professors who worked right next to me.
In 2022, generative AI went mainstream. Mere months ago, it still seemed exclusively the province of the ML research community and of Twitter, where meme accounts like @weirddalle shared the results of feeding text-to-image generation models off-the-wall prompts like "a bottle of ranch dressing testifying in court."
Cut to the present, where generative AI startups like Stability AI and Jasper are raising $100 million rounds of funding, big players like Microsoft have announced upcoming integrations of text-to-image generation, and perhaps all of us have used OpenAI's DALL-E 2 to create create something delightful like this "chicken nugget dressed as a …
The 30th European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA) last month awarded the ESA 2021 Test-of-Time Award to Brown CS Professor Sorin Istrail and his collaborators for their ESA 2001 paper called “SNPs Problems, Complexity, and Algorithms.” The award recognizes “excellent papers in algorithm research that were published … 19-21 years ago and which are still influential and stimulating for the field today,” according to the ESA.
With recent advancements in artificial intelligence and breakthroughs in semiconductor industries, are we really that far away from reaching our wildest dreams — living in harmony with robots we created and being liberated from the daily mundane chores? This is the answer we are trying to find in CSCI 2952-O A Practical Introduction to Advanced 3D Robot Perception.
Tatyana Dyshlova’s last few years have been fast-moving. In 2020, she co-founded and took on the role of CEO at FuzzyBot, a video game development studio, with a small but experienced team of colleagues. Late last year, FuzzyBot announced that it had received $3.5 million in seed funding, a major step forward for the burgeoning company. And her team is now in the midst of developing its first game, which Tatyana says will merge elements of the popular “action rogue” and “life sim” genres to create a unique experience for players.
“As a software developer,” says Brown CS alum Gaurav Manek, “it is your duty to society to make sure that your code is reliable and doesn’t fall apart.” For the last four years, Gaurav — now a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University — has been developing Visigoth, a piece of software that automatically creates schedules based on the availability of participants. Now, Brown CS and a number of departments at other universities are adopting the software to handle the logistics that surround PhD visit days.
Congratulations! We are very proud of your achievements!
The theme of this letter is inspired by an artistic work created by one of our Computer Science graduates of the Class of 2020.
